In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with the president of Rat Sound Systems, Dave Rat. We discuss artistic solutions to technical problems, the best mindset for a finding work and a long fulfilling career, and the time Flea shouted in his face for missing an entrance.

I ask:

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to FOH mixing?

What is the biggest mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.

From FaceBook

Roshan Malim: Ask him about his sub woofers configurations and which is his favorite and why? And what is his most common sub woofer configurations for gigs? His ideas between flown subs and ground stack subs.

Christian Michael Martinez: As an owner of one of the largest production companies, how did you cope with the possibility of failure in the beginning as a small shop? How do you cope with risk now that the company is a success?

Maurizio M. D’Errico: Ask him about his technique of tuning a pa using headphones as a reference and if he still feels the same way about it since he made the YouTube video: How to EQ a Live Sound Reinforcement System.

Craig Gordon: Balancing touring and family/health.

Stephen Mink: Since he has some videos on YouTube about sub placement/patterns/alignment, his thoughts on where in a room to align flown and ground subs.

Dave Gammon: Does he really see the M-Force driver as the future

Garrick Quentin: Has he seen or heard of anyone else not affiliated with Rat sound using the double hung array as he did with the RHCPs and perhaps any comments on the whole concept in terms of its popularity, or otherwise, within the industry.

Davide Bonetti: does he need an assistant? 😇

Steve Knots: What’s the worst setup disaster he ever recovered from to pull off a successful show in the end?

Marty America: How’s your dog doing?

Micah Muth: How’s the Tesla?

The way to be successful is to sell self confidence. Confidence that when you’re there it’s going to be as good as it can possibly be.

Notes

We didn’t borrow money, take any loans or take on any debt until 1997. So, 17 years of business.

We had no idea. Well, we kind of had an idea. Everyone told us we’d fail. “There’s no way you’ll ever survive doing this.”

If I’m 100% behind it and I’m going to make it happen; it’s not whether it will succeed. It’s how long it’s going to take. So if you just don’t even let failure be an option then it’s just a matter of work.

Avoid silver bullets. They don’t come.

Avoid being giant. You want to be happy, stable, and profitable. Being giant is precarious, stressful, and makes you a target for people to come after you.

Probably one of the most common things for green engineers; the kick drum is so loud! It’s distracting from the core purpose, which is to connect the artist with the audience.

If you act like you have a problem, then you have a problem. If you don’t act like you have a problem, then no one knows you have a problem.

The way to be successful is to sell self confidence. Confidence that when you’re there it’s going to be as good as it can possibly be.

We don’t have any problems here today. We just have a big pile of solutions we haven’t found, yet. It’s Ok, because the ones we can’t fix, can’t be fixed. But if it can be fixed, we’re gonna do it.

It’s that unphasability. Combine that with, “Gimme the tools I need to do the job and everything will be fine,” and you can write your own paycheck.

The sub configuration I prefer is the one that covers the venue as best as possible.

The worst thing you can possible do is run your subs mono.

Having a separate L/R sub aux, I find to be extremely useful.

No where in nature do you have two things that are perfectly in time and phase.

No where in nature do multiple unrelated sounds radiate out of a single point in space.

By trying to make it sound the same everywhere, you loose the ability to make it sound great everywhere.

A world-class sound engineer has the ability to recreate a quality sound consistently throughout a variety of environments and challenges.

One of the ways I kept myself happy and sane was to start an external project. One tour it was blogging. It kept me busy. One tour I decided to learn to weld.

By spreading (the mix) out, you can beat the crap out of the bass guitar into the fifteens of one rig, but the low end of the vocals and the low end of the guitar would stay clean. And the guitar could beat the crap out of the sixes in that one rig, but the vocals would be perfectly clean.

In this episode of Sound Design Live I talk with Nicholas Radina while he is mixing monitors on tour for the band O.A.R. We discuss reducing stage volume, troubleshooting wireless transmitters and receivers, recovering from burnout, and how to avoid overwhelm on the job.

I found myself driving home one night, burned out, just thinking to myself, this can’t be the next 10 years of my life.

I found myself a bit burned out, without much direction, and looking for another path.

I started declining gigs that didn’t meet some baseline wants for my life and career. That baseline includes work that helps me move forward, is good for my resume, benefits me on a spiritual level, or is financially rewarding. Looking at every opportunity with these things in mind made it easier to respectfully turn down work that would keep me from growing, make me feel stuck, and ultimately lead to a deeper burn out.

Diversifying and being flexible and available have always been the keys to my self-employed survival. When working at home I freelance with several audio companies, tackling festivals, special events, and corporate work. At this point in my career, $350-500/day seems to be the competitive rate. I write articles for Live Sound International/ProSoundWeb.com, and I created and run SoundNerdsUnite.com, which offers products and teaching resources about live sound. I co-founded and program a special 22-week Latin music series in Cincinnati called Salsa On The Square. I also manage an apartment building.

This business is less about your technical aptitude as it is your personal and social approach. People hire you because of what you personally bring to the table: those traits that are inherent, personal, and one of a kind. Choosing you from a pool of equally qualified applicants is a privilege—treat it as such.

Quotes

My job is to make the artist feel comfortable. I’m really careful of letting my own opinions override what the artist wants.

The amplifier on an active antenna is to make up for the loss of the cable. It has nothing to do with distance and range.

Put your antennas up and high.

There are calculators all over the place for cable loss.

I just had one too many angry tour managers.

All tours end. I had to come home and pay the bills.

Eventually I was fired from that job because I wasn’t available. I thought, How could they fire me?! But when I look back, I’m so grateful that they did because it really gave me freedom in my life to pursue other things.

The most common career-related question I get is how to get on tour. There are some questions that deserve nuanced answers from multiple viewpoints, and this is one of them.

Instead of trying to answer the question directly (e.g., work hard, get lucky, sacrifice a lamb) the best thing I can do is gather compelling stories. The career paths outlined in these stories will give you ideas for actions and next steps in creating your own path. The only rule is that you must take action or the ideas will be forgotten.

I have attempted to order the chapters by experience so that you can first hear from someone who may only be a few years ahead of you and later from people who have been touring for 30 years or more. This is an experimental project and you will notice that the format and style varies between contributors. Don’t worry about the form: the content is paramount.

All of the contributors to this book are sharing their stories in an effort to help you, the reader. Visit their websites, connect with them online, and reach out to them with any follow up questions you might have or experiences you’d like to share.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with touring FOH sound engineer, author, and fashion entrepreneur, Dave Swallow, during his stop in Minneapolis on tour with Erasure. We discuss using timecode to trigger scenes on a Venue Profile console, starting a clothing line, why touring sound engineers are working more, but getting paid less, and what to do about it. I ask:

How did you get the job touring with Erasure?

How do you use the wireless Lake controller to tune the sound system?

What are some ways you used plugins to recreate specific sounds from the album?

What did you want to start a clothing brand?

Why should I care about the speed of sound?

Our wages haven’t gone up in 10-15 year in some cases and there are less shows. When you think about the future of the industry, there is a big question mark.

What [triggering the scenes with timecode] has allowed me to do is focus on sonically how they are sitting in the room. This is especially important when you are stuck mixing at the back of the room.

The problem with putting big reverbs into big rooms, is they are twice as big. One of the things that is quite helpful is using the pre-delay. Getting it up to somewhere between 70-100ms, you give the vocal time to form the words and then you have the extension.

One of the biggest problems with theatres in the US is that they lack bottom end.

My self and my contemporaries are probably the first generation of touring sound engineers that have had to think about having another career. [When you set out on this path] you just think, “Let’s have fun!” But there comes that point when you think, actually, I don’t want to be 60 and living by myself in a rented flat somewhere in north London.

To earn a decent living you need to be out of the house [on tour] for the whole year, to pay for the house that you’re not living in.

You’re losing out to gigs because there is someone younger and cheaper than you are. Experience doesn’t seem to count for as much as it used to because it’s all budget controlled.

When my son was born I only worked six months and we weren’t struggling for cash. These days, if I only work six months, we’ll have a bit of a problem.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I speak with the the Director of Audio at IMS Technology Services, Chris Leonard. We discuss mixing monitors for Tears for Fears, setting up the sound system for the presidential inauguration, and Dante troubleshooting tips. I ask:

How did you get your job at Maryland Sound?

Walk me through the sound system at your last gig at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

A lot of it has to do with your attitude and work ethic. Nowadays work ethic seems like a thing of the past.

As a company you don’t always have the space the bring in a green person right away. You need to have them mature a little bit, but if they mature in a labor pool that you work with all the time and they get to know your gear, I’m more inclined to bring them along on a show.

Networking is key. If you came to town for the first time and said, “Hey I’d like to work with you,” the first thing I’d do is see who you are connected with on LinkedIn or who I know that already knows you.

They were making fun of me for volunteering to work for free and the truck driver said, “You’re all laughing. One day you’re all going to work for him.”